• His original belief that he could just channel his inner
Dr. Doolittle and photographing these animals would
be easy. He assumed food would be a good incentive for
his subjects, but his photograph of a giant pig with food
sprayed all over the lens persuaded him otherwise. Of this
encounter, he says wryly, “Mistakes were made.”
• Momo, a marmoset photographed in Austria, hated him.
This animal with a head the size of a walnut kept peeing
on Musi and getting his five marmoset friends to do the
same thing. And he says, “There was screaming. Lots of
screaming.”
• Kanzi is a male bonobo who exhibits extensive linguistic
aptitude. At the time of Musi’s visit, he demanded coffee
before any shooting could commence.
• Alex the Parrot had a vocabulary of over 100 words and
asked Musi to tickle him during their session.
• Speedbump, the Gunnison’s prairie dog who lives in
Wabash, Indiana, finally stopped screaming when Musi
began speaking to him as an interviewer asking about the
weather in Wabash.
When he is not traveling the world on the trail of big
cats or cruising Route 66, Vince Musi calls Sullivan’s Island,
South Carolina home. Here he shares a brief observation
about what he has learned from the animals and a photo
from the ACE Basin:
“I’ve spent most of my photographic career impatient,
impetuous and in a hurry, trying to get from assignment to
assignment in the least amount of time, often with the least
amount of effort. This makes me the least likely person to be
photographing animals at National Geographic Magazine, a
pursuit that requires patience more than anything. Yet while
the birth of my son taught me patience, the animals I now
photograph have been my best teacher, forcing me to look at
the world differently every day.” NK
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